The idea of Lab 451 is that of a moveable laboratory for international artists to express & emphasize through their own unique art form; a language, whom as a Freedom embodies the way we see & represent the world around us.

The title refers to the dystopian novel from the American writer Ray Bradbury published in 1953 during the McCarthy era & the French New Wave filmmaker François Truffaut who wrote & directed a film adaptation of that novel in 1966.

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.

It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451.

Due to the Gallery capacity, we strongly advise people to come before 7.30pm.
We’ll have refreshments & snacks for the early birds.
Free entry: Donations £2.

Artists

Adam Bohman

Adam Bohman has been operating on the outer fringes of underground music for decades. Working with home-built instruments, found objects, tape cut-ups, collages, ink drawings and graphic scores. Favouring acoustic sounds over electronics, he explores the minute tendrils of sounds coaxed from any number of non-musical instruments and objects. He is a member of British experimental groups, Morphogenesis, The Bohman Brothers, Secluded Bronte, and The London Improvisers Orchestra. Adam’s music is unique and experimental, incorporating Fluxus japery, musique concrete, sound poetry and free improvisation.

Bohman is better known for his experiments in sound, using the detritus of every day life and often working with his brother Jonathan as the Bohman Brothers.

Born and educated in Germany, artist Bettina Schroeder lives and works in London. Her work ranges from painting to sculpture, installations, performance and video art, and is influenced by day to day events and details of everyday life. This can take many forms in what ever seems the most appropriate medium at hand: musical improvisation or cutting up plastic bags to give them new life, even knitting newspapers after reading bad news. Traditional methods like oil painting are also employed, but the initial inspiration, the inescapable reason for working, is always paramount.

In her musical performances she manipulates sound on her electric Ukulele, pushing at the boundaries and definitions of conventional music. She is also a member of the Jerico Orchestra http://cargocollective.com/jerico-orchestra/Jerico-Orchestra, an idiosyncratic group of musicians and artists exploring the relationship between sound and vision.

Bettina moved to London in the 1980s. Her childhood was spent in West Germany’s VW manufacturing town Wolfsburg, after her family’s escape from the former East Germany. Found objects in the shape of toy cars play an important role in ‘Stau’ (traffic jam), one of her most recent works, which is part of an ongoing series of installations, incorporating plastic products.

‘Bettina is an artist who works in different media who pushes forward boundaries and definitions of conventional music.’

For PLAY, BETTINA SCHROEDER and JUDE COWAN MONTAGUE will
do a piece called: ‘The News Feeds‘
From News City presenters Jude C. Montague and Bettina Schroeder
bring you news, latest affairs and current events as they unfold.

Birgitta Hosea is Course Director of MA Character Animation at Central Saint Martins in London. Her own work combines animation and digital video with live art. She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, has been the recipient of numerous awards and artists residencies and is included in the Tate Britain archive. Most recently she was artist-in-residence at Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Azerbaijan and the School of Cinematic Arts, USC, Los Angeles. She is currently curating “Seeafar” for Folkestone Triennial Fringe and Deptford X, UK and “Shadow Voices” for Yarat in Azerbaijan. Recent exhibitions include Chatter – Cinematic Arts Gallery, LA, USA; “Holographic Serendipity” – Kinetica Art Fair, London, UK; “Dans Ma Cellule une Silhouette” – Centre d’Art Contemporain, La Ferme du Buisson, Paris, France; “Out There in the Dark” – Mix 23 Queer Experimental Film Festival, New York, USA. She also writes for academic publications on drawing; digital materiality; animation, performance and liveness and keeps a blog at http://expandedanimation.myblog.arts.ac.uk.

Her work investigates hybrid forms of practice in which animation meets live presence. She has coined the term ‘post-animation’ to describe her practice, because it uses the tools of animation, but does not take the form of an animated film. Rather she creates interdisciplinary works that de-construct conventional notions of animation. Her interest is in exploring animation as both performance and performative act. Is it possible to be both ‘animator’ and also’animated’ at the same time?

Through video installation and performance art, she combines a range of media – animation,manipulated video, paper sculpture, performance drawing, live video feeds and interactive technology – with the live body. This has taken many forms including dressing up as a cartoon character or projecting animation onto herself. Birgitta creates work both as an individual practitioner and also in collaboration with other artists, performers and computer programmers.

Her early practice was in soft sculpture and installation, where she developed an interest in sensual, visceral and tactile forms of communication between the viewer and the work. Her more recent work has been concerned to explore ways in which animation can be generated through sound or physical movement and she has been investigating different ways to project these moving images into three-dimensional space. She is also developing video works for 3D holographic projection in which she animates herself into being through the line.

Birgitta Hosea was born in Edinburgh and now lives and works in London. She has worked freelance in art direction, design for performance, web design and animation.

“Medium” a living picture in which I took the role of a techno-medium, channel digital doubles and emanated electronic ectoplasm, has been performed again at two different events in December 2012.

“Out There In The Dark” 2008
Live performance in which the artist projects an animated dolls face onto
her face to the accompaniment of sound samples from Sunset Boulevard.

For PLAY, Birgitta Hosea and Lynn Lu will perform a piece called ‘Paradoxes for the Virtual’.
A virtual collaboration on live, a Cadavre Exquis (Exquiste Corpse)…

For PLAY, Calum F. Kerr & Miyuki Kasahara will be showing their film.Folklore of Provence: The Cairns of Martigues (1927/2013)

In May 2013. Calum F Kerr and Miyuki Kasahara were in Marseille developing ‘Rhône Nucléaire: The Folklore of Cultural Capital’ for their DeCentreDeSpace residency; a series of alternative responses to Marseille-Provence Capital of Culture 2013 http://decentrederspace.org

In addition to their main film project ‘Rhône Nucléaire: Chasing the Dragon’ are short films examining the writing of the mysterious William Branch-Johnson (1893-?), the English author of ‘Folktales of Provence’ in 1927. The artists followed in the footsteps of ‘Folktales of Provence’ traveling throughout the region combining Branch-Johnson’s local knowledge with a search for modern-day legends surrounding Marseille-Provence Capital of Culture 2013.

Geraldine Gallavardin is a conceptual artist, curator, musician & actress based in London. She’s the founder of Lab451london & actually creating a Free Improvisation Music collective that will start in 2015.

She’s originally from Lyon, France. She holds two MA in Fine Art, one from “Les Beaux-Arts de Grenoble”, France (1997) & one from Chelsea College of Fine Art & Design, London (1999). She collaborates with the Camden Image Gallery in London as a curator & art consultant.

She is doing participatory/readymade performances, social sculptures, installations, drawings, videos, soundscapes & live art as her main artistic language. She used Free Improvised Music/soundscape in her performances & had played abroad & in the UK with band such as “The A Band”. She has exhibited internationally & in the UK in places such as the ICA, the South London Gallery, during the London Biennale on the lawn in front of Tate Modern/The Serpentine Gallery…

She’s curating few shows in the months coming for the Camden Image Gallery, #lab451london She was acting in few films during her artistic career & more recently in “Third Contact” filmed in London by British director Simon Horrocks, the film is now available online (www.thirdcontactmovie.com). She would be acting in the film “The Mentor” by director Ngozi Enuma in September 2014. https://www.facebook.com/TheMentored?fref=ts

For PLAY, JUDE COWAN MONTAGUE and BETTINA SCHROEDER will do a piece called:‘The News Feeds’

Interpreting international news agency feeds through music, poetry and performance.
Jude is an archivist who has worked on the Reuters international news television archive for ten years and writes poetry about raw edits. Her work is acclaimed in the journalist community.

“Jude Cowan has gone where I’ve never seen a jobbing journalist tread before. This is news observed with so discerning an eye that marvellous detail emerges within the poetry. Read her book. We are the richer for it.” Jon Snow, Channel 4 News

Jude also has been producing a series of amazing Dada videos:

From News City presenters Jude C. Montague and Bettina Schroeder bring you news,
latest affairs and current events as they unfold.

Skew Wiff’s practice is a blend of puppetry, performance art and drawing with a strong preference for site-specific work, theatre without walls and other unconventional spaces in London where he currently resides.

“I make work that questions the nature of the human mind and its relation with the material world (body, objects, machinery – habits, addictions). It is a reflection about what we need to live. I am particularly interested in the elements of our daily life that are not visible and without which we could not live (breath, thought-process, emotions, voice/silence, memories, mental imagery).
My work is playful and surreal, crude or subtle but always disturbing enough to leave the viewer perplexed so that the movements of her or his mind is physically felt.”

Skew Wiff is an active member of Outside Puppets collective, CLUSTER BOMB collective and a frequent collaborator of ]Performance S P A C E[ artists.

Specially for the Lab451London PLAY, Skew Wiff will present a piece called:“TOI” (Tale Of the Invisible)
Solo cross-disciplinary pseudo-scientific of works in long term development.

[1983] lives and works in London
Louise graduated from the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University, with first class honours in 2004. In 2012-13 she studied sculpture at The Royal College of Art in London.
“I react spontaneously to the world around me, exploring and questioning the situations and environments I encounter. Collecting and re-contextualising found materials, creating narratives through objects, making sculptural interventions and gestures. My work is an ongoing process of re-coding physical and cultural space to create an ever-changing vapour-trail of ideas, actions and artefacts”
Ashcroft’s sculpture, video and performance work has been exhibited widely in the UK and further afield, most recently at: Technopolis [Departure Foundation, London], The Hockney Gallery [Royal College of Art, London], Performance Studies International Conference [Stanford University, USA], Christies [London], Poppositions Art Fair [Brussels], Turner Contemporary [Margate], Folkestone Triennial, Modern Art Oxford, Squid & Tabernacle [London], InTransit Festival [London] and Oxford Botanical Gardens.

For PLAY, Louise will be showing a video called:
“PRESS YOUR EYEBALLS FORCEFULLY AGAINST THE SCREEN”

Lynn Lu is a visual artist from Singapore. She received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute, completed a Doctoral program at Musashino Art University in Tokyo (ABD) on a full scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2010 she was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Newcastle in Australia.

Among other honors, Lynn was awarded Southampton Solent University’s Research and Enterprise Grant (2012), Singapore National Arts Council Grants (2006-2013), NAC Emerging Artist Grant, and the Lee Foundation Grant (2003). She received the Lois Nellie Gill Award from the Ucross Foundation (2000), and the Samuel Rosenberg Senior Art Award from Carnegie Mellon University (1999). She has also been granted several prestigious artist fellowships, including residencies at the Ucross Foundation, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony in the United States, and Unitec in Auckland, New Zealand.

Lynn has also taught, given talks and papers at School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Columbia College, Vanderbilt University, and San Francisco Art Institute in the United States; Camberwell College of Art (UAL), Wimbledon College of Art (UAL), Chelsea College of Art and Design (UAL), Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, Southampton Solent University in the UK; Sverigefinska folkhögskolan in Sweden; Theatre Academy Helsinki in Finland; Akademie der bildenden Künste in Munich in Germany; at Unitec in Auckland and Massey University in New Zealand; Hansung University in Seoul, Korea; National University of Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Nanyang Technological University, and School of the Arts (SOTA) in Singapore.

Lynn lives and works in London as an independent artist, curator, & advisor to ]performance s p a c e[.

In my practice, the sentient body is seen as the main medium for perceiving and presenting (versus representing) meaning (versus message) through direct personal experience. Engaging vigorously with the present reality of all that is here-and-now, the meaning of my context-specific works often manifest in the resonant relationships created between myself and my audience, and between the audience themselves. My current research looks at the connection between experiential knowledge and the innate human capacity for empathy, in relation to a genre performance art I call “gutty”. This gutty form of performance art which uses the body just as it is – as vulnerable/resilient/sensitive as it is in everyday life – relies heavily on empathy to create meaning that is not merely conceptual but also affective and visceral. In other words, I look at why some performances not only tickle our brains but also quite literally leave us feeling like we’ve been punched in the gut.

If I include some thinking time whilst alone in the womb, I have been 50 years on this planet and I now feel more of an inclination to look at the past in terms of changes and consistency. What is different: in the world, what I do, what I have, what I want? What is the same: in my world, about how I act, about how others act? Firstly, and being more honest than when I was young, I care a whole lot less than I did then. In particular my thirst for any knowledge, whether actual or philosophical has diminished. Not what you were hoping to hear, but this need to enquire has only detracted from the more important aspects of life to the point where I don’t actually know what is important anymore.

About the Broken Gold Watch

The principle of the Broken Gold Watch is about the maintenance and retention of things or the performing of activities beyond their usefulness. The watch is broken, it does not work anymore and cannot be used as a tool to derive the time. It is made of gold, a metal that has a sense of value beyond its real monetary wealth. In a fairy tale world gold is still the currency of choice. My broken gold watch is the saxophone and music.

The Boxes

The result of much musical activity is now being captured in boxes. The first boxes were the series of 52 Noisy Little Clouds produced during the period between August 2009 and August 2010. Each box was different, with a pieces being recorded, finished and transferred to CD at a rate of one per week. Additional photographs, postcards and texts were included. These were then sent to 52 people (actually 48, as I’ve kept some back).

The 3rd Edition of the 52 Noisy Little Clouds is in progress and will complete February 2015.

The 1980s. Things appeared to matter.

I read recently of the death of Ray (of Ray’s Jazz Shop). This prompted me to consider an important part of my life. A time when the adventures in music had just begun and there remained new sounds to be discovered.

I started coming to London on record buying excursions in 1980 when I was 15. On my first visit I was looking for Albert Ayler’s Bells and John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass. I found both in Ray’s together with Sun Ra’s La Nuit De La Foundation Maeght, Evan Parker/Paul Lytton’s Ra 1 and 2 and Roscoe Mitchell’s Nonaah.

Around this time I visited Bill Lewington’s saxophone shop in Cambridge Circus with the intent of buying a sopranino saxophone. I came out with a Meister soprano. This was my main instrument until 2000 when I finally acquired a sopranino instrument.

Other record shops of interest at this time were Dobell’s, Mole and Direction Records on Dean Street. Direction’s specialisation was more with Contemporary Classical music and what is now probably categorised as Avant Rock (Henry Cow, Soft Machine, Faust).

In 1983 I came to London to study Mathematics. Located near Oxford Street I could visit Ray’s almost daily. Mole Jazz was only several tube stops away. My grant disappeared on an addiction to vinyl. The turnover in these shops seemed immense. Similarly, the book shops on Charing Cross Road seemed to be restocking daily.

I was also involved with the improvised music group that was organised around the Cockpit Theatre in Lisson Grove. The group met each Saturday afternoon to perform improvised music and some compositions. It was here that I met Adam and Jonathon Bohman, Teddy Coleridge and Nick Couldry.

Over the period from 1984 to 1989 a number of events caused some fundamental changes in my attitude.

Firstly, at the outset I had some hope of playing music professionally fuelled by an unfounded optimism that performing in London would guarantee an audience. The first concert with the group at the Cockpit Theatre changed this. Despite an announcement that I managed to arrange on Radio 3 (it was a question and answer session and I should have been asking a question), a listing in City Limits and numerous flyers handed out at other peoples concerts, our audience was smaller than the number of players.

Secondly, I thought I was playing Jazz, that I was part of a long heritage of saxophone players. Having spent several years learning Classical Guitar, an activity I now wish I hadn’t given up, I had decided that my approach to the saxophone would be different. I would simply live with the instrument and play it whenever I could, investigating the instrument’s possibilities, tonal variation, pitch and rhythmic potential. This process has continued for nearly 30 years.

In Aylesbury around 1985, I would play a solo set during the intermission at the Sunday Lunchtime Jazz Session at the Civic Centre. The group played standards and with the exception of Blue Monk all compositions were pre-Bebop. I considered myself to be, aesthetically at least, in a field more advanced than Charlie Parker taking my linage through Ornette Coleman to Albert Ayler and with a few further developments arriving at myself. After all was there not a historic principle that art (music, painting) should become more abstract, less thematic, less figurative and more about exemplifying the means of production (sound, paint). Surely, it was just a case of waiting for the audience to catch up. A combination of arrogance and ignorance and I had fallen into the fallacy of modernist thinking, that Art really exists in a vacuum.

Back to the Sunday Lunchtime Jazz Session and there came a point when the house band told me to desist from playing. There had been some complaints, “and anyway it isn’t really Jazz is it?” I WASN’T PLAYING JAZZ! I left, outraged. In retrospect this was of course true. Jazz as a tradition probably ceased to exist in the 1950s, in Aylesbury or anywhere else for that matter. The socio-economic changes and locations where Jazz music was played had become so different compared with its origins that the term seems redundant for music production after this period.

For PLAY, Mark Browne & Adam Bohman will collaborate on a Duo piece.
A Free Improvisation must that will involve texts, saxophone & eclectic settings of sound objects.

Born in Canada and based in London, artist Melanie Coles works primarily with collage, although her work spans from video to large-scale installation to 3D optical illusion. Originating from a town of 4000 in the Northern most tip of the Great Basin Desert, Coles began using discarded books and objects as the source of her collages. Often abstract or distorted, forms range from miniature sculptures to 90 square foot xerox prints, experimental art zines to 1300 square foot public paintings.

Video shown during the show reel of Lab451London; On perspective
“Single Image animation“
Single image animated with a xerox photocopier. Still & sound clip from Orson Welles’ The Immortal Story.

For PLAY, Melanie will present a new video “The Net Hollywood Trailer Remix”
One of an endless series of experiments playing with analog technologies in a digital realm to create new forms and medias.

Miyuki Kasahara is inspired by many social and political issues particularly at present our attitudes to Nuclear Power. She is also interested in cross-cultural myths and folklore, and the memories or stories of people she encounters. In response to the Fukushima disaster March 2011, She will be showing her work at Bury Art Museum as part of the Asia Triennial Manchester September – November 2014.

For PLAY, Calum F. Kerr & Miyuki Kasahara will be showing a film.Folklore of Provence: The Cairns of Martigues (1927/2013)

In May 2013. Calum F Kerr and Miyuki Kasahara were in Marseille developing ‘Rhône Nucléaire: The Folklore of Cultural Capital’ for their DeCentreDeSpace residency; a series of alternative responses to Marseille-Provence Capital of Culture 2013 http://decentrederspace.org

In addition to their main film project ‘Rhône Nucléaire: Chasing the Dragon’ are short films examining the writing of the mysterious William Branch-Johnson (1893-?), the English author of ‘Folktales of Provence’ in 1927. The artists followed in the footsteps of ‘Folktales of Provence’ traveling throughout the region combining Branch-Johnson’s local knowledge with a search for modern-day legends surrounding Marseille-Provence Capital of Culture 2013.

Oliver Evelyn-Rahr

Oliver Evelyn-Rahr’s practice involves a diverse range of disciplines from performance and video to social programs and sculpture. A recent graduate of the Artist Teacher MA program at Goldsmiths, his most recent work has been exploring the complex overlapping territories between the worlds of Fine Art, Theatre and Film.

Ram Samocha is a multi-disciplinary artist working in performance and visual arts.
As an immigrant artist, Samocha focuses on the issues of personal and global transformation by combining drawing, video, installation, and performance. Using a personal artistic language that speaks via abstraction and the physical process of repetitive line-based actions, the work reflects on global issues while eschewing an overt political narrative.
Samocha’s work is part of various museum and private collections and has been shown in The UK, Israel, Italy, The Netherlands, Germany, Mexico, The United States, and Canada.

For PLAY, Ram will be showing a video of this performance:

Connections, 2012

A Short documentation of a live drawing performance made by the artist in 2012 at the Tivon Art Gallery, Israel. Curator: Taly Cohen Garbuz, Videographer: Yonatan Zaid.

Traces from this performance can be seen here:

For the lab451London PLAY, Ram will do a live performance called The Agreement (Plus Minus), 2014
New drawing performance for two players.

Ram Samocha’s new live drawing performance will going to run for about twenty minutes. The drawing tool for this action is going to be a self-inking stamp. The artist will be drawing, with some support from the viewers, on a large piece of paper while using two large self-inking stamps. On one stamp there will be a large black plus sign and on the other a minus sign.

Sitron Panopoulos is a Greek poet/musician working in London for the past decade.
Short music poetry performance about London as seen by the eyes of the foreigner. The city I’m looking at is the land of endless options, myriads of unmade beds, transient lovers and friends that switch capitals around the globe. Using memory and geography as a starting point the show is looking the change of factors one considers when deciding to make a city their home.

Zuky Serper

In his Revolution Machines series of day-long performances (2001-2010) and publications, Zuky Serper examined boundaries of audience participation, authorship of artwork and the value of labour in artworks. He is currently artist in residence at the Centre for World Environmental History and convenor of Activists and Acdemia Forum in the University of Sussex, supported by the British Academy. He has an ongoing interest in the concepts of the un-artist and community gardening.
Zuky has been working as a garden educator in Reay Primary School in South London since 2008, following artist residencies in schools in Exeter, Basildon, Walthamstow, London. In his pedagogic work Zuky developed curriculum and out of doors activities to encourage children’s and teachers’ investigation and enjoyment of work, art and process in the garden. He is a visiting tutor in the sculpture department at Brighton University, and taught Critical Theory in Goldsmiths College, London. He is a visual artist with background in horticulture.
Zuky Serper (b. 1965) is currently working on his stickworks and WONKYTOYS, has lived and worked in London and Lewes, UK since 1999, and previously lived in Kibbutz Sa’ar (1986-1999).